CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF MORPHOLOGICAL PROCESSES IN ENGLISH AND HAUSA: A STUDY OF PSALM 91

Abstract

Morphology, being the study of word structure and formation, plays a central role in understanding how languages encode grammatical and lexical meaning. To this end, meaning exist at various levels of language stud (Edet, 2021; Korochkina & Rastle, 2025). However, significant typological differences exist between English, a largely analytic language, and Hausa, a synthetic and morphologically rich language. These differences become particularly evident in translated religious texts, where equivalent meanings are expressed through structurally divergent morphological systems. This study therefore investigated the contrastive morphological processes in English and Hausa languages using Psalm 91 as a parallel corpus. The aim of this study was to conduct a contrastive analysis of morphological processes in Psalm 91 using King James English and Littafi Mai Sarki Hausa versions through the theoretical framework of Item-and-Arrangement (henceforth IA) and Word-and-Paradigm (henceforth WP) theories to account for the observed linguistic patterns. The specific objectives were to: identify and analyse morphological processes in the English version of Psalm 91; examine morphological structures in the Hausa translation of Psalm 91; compare the morphological systems of both languages; apply Word and Paradigm Theory in analysing morphological patterns; utilise Item-and-Arrangement Theory for morphemic segmentation. As such, the study employed a qualitative descriptive research design and purposive sampling to select Psalm 91 as a parallel bilingual text. Data were collected through systematic extraction of lexical items and analysed using morphological segmentation and contrastive comparison. Findings revealed that English morphology is predominantly analytic, with limited inflection and productive derivation, while Hausa exhibits a richer, more systematic morphological structure characterised by extensive affixation, possessive marking, and paradigmatic verb systems. The study further showed that Item-and-Arrangement Theory is more suitable for English morphological segmentation, whereas Word-and-Paradigm Theory gave a better explanation of Hausa morphological relationships. The study contributes to the domain of morphology by clarifying English–Hausa morphological distinctions in the Biblical text. It also validates the complementary application of IA and WP theories, and informs linguistic analysis, translation, and language pedagogy.